The worst-selling Microsoft product of all time

December 26, 2022 4:41 PM

"One of my former colleagues spoke with the person who took over from him as the support specialist for OS/2 for Mach 20. According to that person’s memory (which given the amount time that has elapsed, means that we should basically be saying “according to legend” at this point), a total of eleven copies of “OS/2 for Mach 20” were ever sold, and eight of them were returned."
posted by clawsoon (22 comments total)

I had forgotten such ancient history like "there was an OS/2 that ran on the 80286"!
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:21 PM on December 26, 2022 [3 favorites]

I started OS/2 with the 3.x release so the earlier versions were mostly communal memory of the bad old days. I’d never even heard of the MACH cards before, but it reminds me of the NEC V20 & Cyrix 486SLC chips we’d gotten to make hand-me-down PCs less sluggish. They were faster but usually held back by the rest of the system.
posted by adamsc at 5:45 PM on December 26, 2022 [2 favorites]

woah this is so interesting. i'm always happy to be reminded about raymond chen's blog....i forget about it for like 2 years and then find it again and stay up all night reading his posts.

this is wild and i'd love to get some confirmation for someone who worked in like, accounting:

This bias toward upgrading an old computer to a pale imitation of a more advanced computer was exacerbated by tax laws and generally-accepted accounting principles.

During this era, technology was advancing far faster than the accounting industry could keep up. Computers were classified as office equipment, which at the time had a seven-year depreciation schedule. But computers were improving so rapidly that a seven-year-old computer was beyond obsolete. Companies needed to upgrade their computers, but their accountants wouldn’t let them just throw out the old ones since they still had several years of depreciation left and consequently had no budget for buying new computers. “The government says that these have to last seven years, so by golly, you’re going to make them last seven years!”

These upgrade cards were much less expensive than a new computer and could be more easily hidden inside your office equipment budget, thereby avoiding a lot of arguments with accountants.

fantastic post btw
posted by capnsue at 6:31 PM on December 26, 2022 [9 favorites]

Remembering OS/2 (well at least in the form of the IBM licensed and renamed ArcaOS) is still available for sale and receives regular updates to allow it to be virtualized / run on modern hardware, is like losing the game for me.

It’s 35 years old now, and in 65 years OS/2 will turn 100 and I’m sure some system somewhere will still have it in a component….with computer archeologists responsible for trying to determine its workings.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 7:47 PM on December 26, 2022 [5 favorites]

Hang on, a Microsoft product? OS/2 was an IBM operating system, wasn't it?
posted by MartinWisse at 12:49 AM on December 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

Reminds me how Apple at one time included free lifetime live support on Mackintoshes, tried to renege, was sued, lost, and so there is still someone to this day responsible to provide support for 92-96 Macs when someone calls 1-800-SOS-APPL.
posted by Mitheral at 12:51 AM on December 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

MartinWisse - it started off as a joint venture, then Microsoft pulled out leaving it just to IBM.
posted by edd at 1:14 AM on December 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

Re: accounting. Asset depreciation is a real thing with real budgetary implications. I have a vault full of industrial printing equipment that i can't get rid of because it hasn't depreciated enough to put it up for auction or recycling.
posted by gwydapllew at 4:23 AM on December 27, 2022 [4 favorites]

Companies needed to upgrade their computers, but their accountants wouldn’t let them just throw out the old ones since they still had several years of depreciation left and consequently had no budget for buying new computers.

The university library that I worked at many years ago was subject to state regulations like that; subsequently, more than one room (in a facility that could have used those rooms for any number of other things) was dedicated to being a mausoleum for digital dinosaurs.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:28 AM on December 27, 2022 [7 favorites]

there was an OS/2 that ran on the 80286

I happened across a copy of OS/2 1.21 in the 90s and for fun installed it on an old 286 I had in a closet -- and it was surprisingly good! Not much software for it, unfortunately, but it multitasked on the 286 which, at least as far as anyone knew, wasn't designed to multitask.

Once I was discussing it on a board with some people familiar with the project, and their explanation for why the 286 version of OS/2 never went anywhere was because Microsoft was largely driving the project and they only wanted to support 386s and higher, so, boom, killed OS/2 for the 286. Then, once OS/2 for 386 was out but Microsoft Windows 3.0 sold way better than expected, Microsoft decided to take their ball and leave and made IBM take the Windows support out of OS/2, resulting in the "you need both an OS/2 license and a separate install of Windows to get it to work". So, most of the story of OS/2 is "Microsoft acted like they supported it but did everything they could to make it not work". I had used OS/2 through versions 2 and 3 and was a beta-tester for 4, but lack of hardware drivers forced me back into the Windows-only world not long after.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:32 AM on December 27, 2022 [5 favorites]

OS/2 was an IBM operating system, wasn't it?

It was a joint IBM / Microsoft project; it was intended to run both OS/2 native and Windows software, with a much-better multitasking engine than Windows had to begin with. Microsoft was never really behind it and IBM was...well...IBM so like many technologies which were superior but hampered by their corporate overlords, it didn't get traction. Microsoft took what they learned from OS/2's multitasking and made the NT line of software, which became the Windows we use today.
posted by AzraelBrown at 7:37 AM on December 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

Steve Jobs IBM: We have better stuff.
Bill Gates: You don't get it. That doesn't matter.
posted by jabah at 8:14 AM on December 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

One of my friends helps Raymond out with the blog sometimes. It sounds like fun.

At least they didn't lose this package, like they did with the FOCAL interpreter.
posted by scruss at 9:58 AM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

A lot of scientific hardware used OS/2 for the controlling computer, UV-vis and IR spectrometers and the like. I actually purchased OS/2 installation disks off of ebay circa 2006 to revive a HPLC that lost its harddrive.
posted by 445supermag at 3:57 PM on December 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

it multitasked on the 286 which, at least as far as anyone knew, wasn't designed to multitask.

I believe it was the 286 that introduced virtual 8086 mode. Not as good as 386 protected mode with page tables and all the other goodness that makes modern OSes and multitasking modern, but for running WordStar at the same time as 123, it did what it needed to do.
posted by wierdo at 7:01 PM on December 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Is this why tholen gets so upset about OS/2?
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:04 AM on December 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Speaking of high profile tech projects that never saw widespread adoption, there is an amazing chart of Itanium sales forecasts over time that starts with boldly predicting $40 billion/year and then reveals increasingly lower estimates as time goes on and sales never picked up. There's a reason it was nicknamed "The Itanic" soon after launch...
posted by autopilot at 8:50 AM on December 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Read up on the history of Workplace OS, the one OS to rule them all from IBM. I was at Compaq at the time and the stories from ex-IBM’s were depressing. There were healthy debates on USENET at the time about how it was about to ship, including many posts by Tholen if memory serves, but knew from water cooler talk that it was never going to ship.
posted by beowulf573 at 9:10 AM on December 28, 2022

This incredible vintage computing/gaming blog has a great series of posts about the development of OS/2 and Windows. Starts here, although it doesn't get to OS/2 specifically until this one. Wild enough, the most recent post in the series (about Netscape v. Microsoft) was just posted last week.
posted by General Malaise at 12:09 PM on December 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

The university library that I worked at many years ago was subject to state regulations like that; subsequently, more than one room (in a facility that could have used those rooms for any number of other things) was dedicated to being a mausoleum for digital dinosaurs.


Haha me too, I'd do inventory and come up way short and the guy would be like, oh, you need to go check the graveyard and sure enough there were millions of dollars (on paper anyway) of useless old stuff. They weren't even permitted to give it away.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:17 PM on December 28, 2022

Thanks for posting this. I'll have nightmares tonight from having to do desktop support for every weird software and hardware combos back in the 80s ;)
posted by baegucb at 6:10 PM on December 28, 2022

In the late 1980's I had a couple of Wave Mate BULLET 286 motherboards.

They ran an 80286 processor on an XT bus.

Still only DOS :)

Good times.
posted by mmrtnt at 10:27 AM on December 29, 2022